Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News and NBC News host, blasted HBO Max on Wednesday for pulling “Gone With the Wind” after widespread protests against racial injustice.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the newly-launched HBO Max will remove “Gone With the Wind” temporarily. The movie will return “with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”
“Are we going to pull all of the movies in which women are treated as sex objects too?” Kelly tweeted on Wednesday, in response to the report. “Guess how many films we’ll have left? Where does this end??”
"OK @hbomax - let’s do this - every episode of 'Friends' needs to go right now. If not, you hate women (& LGBTQ ppl, who also don’t fare well on 'Friends'). Obviously Game of Thrones has to go right now," Kelly continued. "Anything by John Hughes ... Woody Allen... could go on & on... & on...& on..."
The streaming service told the Journal that “Gone With the Wind,” which was released in 1939, is a “product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.”
The movie has long faced criticism over its depiction of slaves as romantic and idealized. John Ridley, whose screenplay for “12 Years a Slave” won an Academy Award for its frank portrayal of slavery, wrote in an opinion piece earlier this week that HBO Max should remove the film.
“It is a film that glorifies the antebellum south,” Ridley wrote in the Los Angeles Times on Monday. “It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.”
He added that “Gone With the Wind" perpetuates “the racism that’s causing angry and grieving Americans to take to the streets.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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